


No One Was Ever There

by WareWolf



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, My personal therapy after watching episode 21 "There's Something About Mary.", Spoilers for episode 21, spoilers for season 12
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-17
Updated: 2017-05-17
Packaged: 2018-11-01 19:00:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10928019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WareWolf/pseuds/WareWolf
Summary: My personal therapy after watching episode "There's Something About Mary."  I had no idea what else was on the way.....Bobby comforts Crowley, as much as a human can help a demon, after Crowley has terrifying visions of an alternate earth.





	No One Was Ever There

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know whether Sam and Dean would have told Bobby about The French Mistake, but I'm choosing to believe not, though I can see Sam hinting at it.

_The scene opens in a cheap motel in Lebanon, Kansas; the centre of North America.   All you need to know is that this is an AU where Bobby Singer is alive (he gets brought back from Heaven, or should one say, kicked out) and where Crowley has a closer relationship with the Winchesters than is canon, and ultimately a much closer one with Bobby.  It was written as self therapy after watching episode 21 of season 12, so contains spoilers for that._

 

Bobby Singer started awake from a confused dream of fighting a pack of werewolves which had followed him into a bar.  Someone had started yelling in his ear and the cry followed him into wakefulness, as did an elbow in his ribs.  He gasped in pain and grabbed the flailing arm, wrestling his bed companion down with his weight until there was stillness.  Awkwardly, Bobby reached with his other hand to flick the switch, bringing the lights up just enough to be able to make out the form and the face of the man below him.

“Sorry, darling,” said the King of Hell, blinking up at him.  “Bad dreams.”  His dark hair was tousled into an incredible mess, which Bobby refused to find cute.

“You don’t say,”  Bobby grumbled.  “How’d you even stay asleep long enough to have any dreams?”

“It happens.” 

Bobby shifted off him, settling to his side, taking in the surrounding motel bedroom until he was satisfied all was ordinary and calm, that any problems really were inside Crowley’s head.  _In Kansas; house-hunting_ , he reminded himself.  “You want to, uh, tell me?”  he asked.

That would normally have elicited various sarky responses but this time Crowley was silent for several moments before he spoke.  “I was….somewhere above and Lucifer was my prisoner.  He was smirking at me and saying something typically moronic, and then I found myself pinned by his will and thrown against a wall, then the floor.  I was absolutely terrified and taken by surprise, love, neither something I’m used to these days.  Lucifer made me rise up until I was on my feet and then he came at me, slowly, but I couldn’t move, and drew a dagger along my face and then stabbed me in the heart.  I _died_ , Bobby, died in the dream and as I was waking, I could remember what I’d been thinking in my last seconds….”

“About me?”  Bobby hazarded, half joking, wanting to pull him out of this mood.

“No, Robert, you weren’t there.  You weren’t anywhere.  I was….alone, acting alone, and that was completely natural for me.  I didn’t trust anyone.  But Lucifer had got the jump on me and I was thinking… that I wanted the Winchesters to be there.  That I had helped them so many times and now I needed them, they weren’t there.  If my dear mother had been present, she’d have been cheering Lucifer on.  No one was ever there.”

“Shit,”  Bobby grumbled, reaching out for him and pulling the unresisting Crowley closer so that he could wrap his arms about him.  He rubbed his back soothingly and, unable to think of anything better to say, kissed him instead, on his bearded cheek, then his lips.  Crowley sighed and returned the kiss for a long moment.  “It’s just a stupid dream,”  Bobby told him.  “You been hanging around humans too much;  we do this all the damn time.  You should’ve come into my dream and helped me sort out the damn werewolves spilling my drink on the bar.”

Crowley chuckled a little.  “Yours does sound more fun, love.  But mine wasn’t exactly a dream.  Demons don’t dream like humans.  We travel, in our minds – it’s not a concept that I can explain in human words – but it’s likely that what I dreamed actually happened, in some other concept of us.”

“You mean like alternate worlds?”  Bobby asked.  “Sam talked about that a time or two;  he reads all kinds of weird shit and he said there’s this theory about alternate worlds that spin off from any kind of tiny thing, like in one you got red hair instead of brown,  or you married somebody different from how you did here or you were never born.  He thinks there’s an alternate where there aren’t any monsters;  no werewolves or demons or anything, and him and Dean weren’t even hunters.  Didn’t sound like it would be a fun place to visit,”  he concluded, patting Crowley’s bare shoulder.

“No, it usually isn’t.”

“You mean it’s _real_?”

Crowley went quiet again and Bobby thought of what he’d just told him and mentally kicked himself.   “It’s not real for us,”  he said gently.  “C’mon, you’re here with me and we’re going to get a place here in town, and even if you do have to go and do your King of Hell thing, it’s gonna be here for you to come back to.  And you know Sam and Dean would help you out, they let you stay in the bunker with me, didn’t they?”

Crowley listened to him almost desperately and Bobby talked, giving him something to anchor to, even if he didn’t really know what he should say to this demon, to this man he loved beyond reason.

Even if you lived in a nightmare, there would come a time when you woke.

It was supposed to be impossible for a demon ever to cease being what he was, to make up for whatever he’d done in life to damn him, but then, it was also said that demons could not love.  He, Robert Singer, was living proof that wasn’t so, at least in this world.  He resolved to make sure that the terrible and lonely death Crowley had dreamed would never come true here.

 

 


End file.
